Flourishing Seeds. Value Creation and Relatedness in Agrobiodiversity Hotspots

AgricultureAgriculture condenses the most pressing challenges we are facing today: ecological degradation, financial deregulation and demographic explosion.

Value discrepancies are key obstacles toward integrated agriculture which are not rewarding in the capitalist economy overwhelmed by a profit-driven agroindustry. However, we still lack fundamental knowledge to identify the manifold values of agricultural assets.

While the value of crop varieties is usually assessed in economic terms, we need to also consider the ethical values that incentivies farmers to perpetuate biodiverse agriculture.

Beside empirical timeliness, this study contributes to the elaboration of a general anthropology of value still lacking to date.

The SeedsValues contends that agriculture offers a unique object to overcome the current split between the economic and the ethical studies on value.

This will be achieved by producing interspecies ethnographies into seed-human relatedness - both affective and instrumental - in three agrobiodiversity hotspots: potato cultivation in Peru, maize in Mexico and rice in Laos.

Prominent on global markets, also distinguished by international institutions as highly promising to reach global food security, these crops bear outstanding value to the Indigenous people who cultivate and eat them daily.

Sometimes, they are treated as organisms imbued with a subjectivity, challenging Western dichotomies between object and subject, nature and culture.

In this light, this project aims at unravelling (a) the ethics of seed growing, (b) the appreciation of seeds in exchange and consumption, and (c) the entanglements between growers' and seeds qualities.

Beside addressing critical ecological questions regarding the sustainable feeding of an increasing human population, this research at the interface of anthropology and biology promises significant theoretical advances in the anthropology of value by investigating a vital object: the cultivation of flourishing seeds.